Global Voices Online

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Global Voices launches new search function!

Rebecca MacKinnon · 17:04

Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman and tech guru Boris Anthony have put together a new “Global Voices Web” search using the new Google Co-op platform which enables you to create your own search engine. Check it out - it's in the yellow search bar near the top of the page right under the “tag cloud.”

In addition to being able to search all of Global Voices or all of Google, now you can also search “the Global Voices Web.” Right now, that includes about 4,800 blogs that our Regional Editors follow each day, and from which they select their “Daily Links”. In other words, when you use this search function, you are searching all the blogs that we regularly link to or which our editors have found worth following.

GV doesn't cover North America and Western Europe because we believe the views of people from those parts of the world get disproportionately more attention on the world wide web and in the global media than people from all other regions. GV is meant to be a small effort towards counter-balancing that imbalance. Thus the search includes few blogs from N.America or W.Europe except for blogs by members of various diasporas currently living in the West. The point is to have a search that covers the same footprint of citizen media that GV covers.

This new “Global Voices Web” search was constructed by Ethan and Boris using Google's Co-op search, with a bit of help from some people at Google who responded to their requests for changes. When Ethan and Boris started putting it together, Ethan blogged about the lack of results on some terms in a post titled “What Google Coop Search Doesn't Do Well.” The folks at Google eventually read his post and fixed the problem. Google engineer Vrishali Wagle wrote about the fix on the Google Custom Search blog and says he encourages people to give more feedback. Ethan is now much happier.

Note that our search is still very very “beta.” Because it was constructed by importing the feeds from editors' aggregators, we had to weed out a bunch of non-blog and off-topic feeds (news sites, U.S. tech blogs, and things like that). If you try it out please let us know if there are any non-blog or off-topic sites we've failed to weed out or if there appear to be glaring omissions. We're sure it is far from perfect at this stage which is why we need as many people as possible to test it out and let us know what's wrong.

As Ethan explains in his blog post about this new search function: “a future version will include all the sites we link to on GV, which should expand the collection quite a bit. And an even further off version will integrate with the giant aggregator we’ll be offering on the site next year, which will let you look at new posts from all the countries we cover, as well as offering suggestions for feeds we should be watching - the blogs covered by that aggregator will be the same blogs tracked by the search engine.”

Please help us make it better. We are already discovering things we want to improve and would like to know your requests and concerns.

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Egypt: Bloggers open the door to police brutality debate

Sameer Padania · 13:47

‘Extraordinary rendition' has passed into common parlance over the last year as human rights organisations have accused the US government of exporting suspects to be tortured in regimes like Egypt, Morocco and Syria. But while cases involving international suspects get the headlines, these countries are regularly cited by human rights activists as having a major domestic torture problem, with the police in particular seeming to act with total impunity.

Now in Egypt, bloggers have struck a blow against police torture, by publicising videos shot by police officers of their colleagues beating suspects, and of police cadets receiving training. Add to this articles in the independent press and protests by civil society organisations, what's fast becoming a national campaign is gathering momentum.

Demagh Mak and Wael Abbas writing in Arabic, and others writing in English, such as Hossam e-Hamalawy, have consistently sought out and brought to light videos of incidents of police brutality on their blogs over the past few months. It's videos like this one - uploaded by Wael Abbas - that appear to be shifting the debate:

As reported by Hossam el-Hamalawy, an investigation has been launched into the conduct of the officer shown slapping the suspect in the above video, although it has now emerged that the officer in question has not yet been suspended from duty.

The brutality of Egypt's police is not a new story - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights have regularly documented and condemned police brutality in briefings and reports.

But sustained pressure from the bloggers, and the publication of an investigative piece into the police torture video in the independent Egyptian weekly newspaper, El-Fagr, have forced the story into the mainstream. On 27th November 2006, El-Fagr published an expose on violence against suspects in the country's police stations, identifying the officers in the video above, and describing a second, much more brutal video.

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Arabisc: Imprisoned Egyptian Blogger Lost in Legal Wrangle!

Amira Al Hussaini · 10:39

In my last post, I translated excrepts from a post written by Egyptian blogger Abdulkareem Sulaiman, who is being held in custody for articles he wrote online, describing the unhealthy conditions he is being forced to adapt to behind bars.

Well, his saga seems to continue, in a legal tangle and a tug of war game with authorities, who are ensuring that Kareem is punished even before he goes on trial for the list of allegations against him - which extend from writing blasphemous articles against Islam to defaming the President of Egypt.

Fellow blogger Jar Al Qamar reports a minute by minute breakdown of the eventful day he went to the Public Prosecutor, along with Kareem's lawyers and representatives from human rights groups, to hear what the judge had to say. Surprise, surprise..Kareem was no where to be seen!

خلال هذا الأسبوع تم ترحيل كريم من حبسه بقسم محرم بك لسجن الحضره بناءً على طلبه الشخصي لتضرره من إنعدام الخصوصيه بزنزانة القسم .. يمنح السجن قدرا اكبر منها .. غير ان نزلاءه اكثر خطرا و محاولات الزياره و الإمداد اكثر صعوبه

“This week, Kareem was transferred from the Muharram Baik Police Station prison to the Hadhra Prison, based on his request because of the lack of any privacy. Despite the fact that the new prison allows him a little bit more of a breathing space, it's inmates and much more dangerous and attempts to visit and replenish his supplies extremely difficult,” he wrote.

With the lawyers, Al Jazeera television camera crew and a journalist and other activisits waiting in one court, Kareem seems to have been sent to another place for his hearing.

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Links

Eastern & Central Europe

The Turkish Invasion writes about the Moscow subway: “It is just like being married… You can't do with or without it.“

Eastern & Central Europe

Andy Young has relaunched Siberian Light, a blog on Russia, and reports on a deadly fire at a Moscow drug rehabilition hospital, which killed 45 women last night.

Eastern & Central Europe

Sean's Russia Blog writes about a strange verdict in the antifa activist's murder case: the murderers have been convicted for “hooliganism.”

Eastern & Central Europe

Attempts to untangle the details of Aleksandr Litvinenko's poisoning, from different perspectives: by a reader at La Russophobe - here, and by Copydude - here, here, and here.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Le Pangolin provides an update on the status of Africans who have migrated to Spain on rafts in the thousands in the past year (Fr): “Spain, which in an initial phase had decided to welcome them under pressure from France and the UK, just changed its position and has hardened like the other countries. The last week of September 2006 marked the return of migrants to Senegal. The return is implemented on special planes (like animals). Many thousand Senegalese have been repatriated that way in exchange for a minimal sum given to the government to reinforce maritime control in Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal.”

Eastern & Central Europe

Copydude writes about Russian female bodyguards.

Eastern & Central Europe

A Step At A Time links to Edward Lucas' piece on the “new cold war.”

Sub-Saharan Africa

Le Pangolin blames (Fr) the mass emigration attempts of the young in Senegal and Africa and increasing prostitution among young women on a crisis affecting this majority age group. The blogger lists nine causes of the crisis including the lack of services for youth and for young women specifically, the failures of politicians in training and ceding leadership to youth, lack of nutritional and sanitary security, growing materialism and an inferiority complex. He concludes: “Africa needs a cultural revolution.”

Central Asia & Caucasus

Registan.net reports on the Uzbek president's Constitution Day speech, in which he announced the theme for the new year.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Afrigadget writes about a foldaway house in South Africa: “Rajan Harinarain, a South African entrepreneur and inventor has come up with a temporary foldaway house for use in emergency situations complete with electrical wiring and fittings, doors and windows that can be erected by a small team in 5 minutes.”

Sub-Saharan Africa

UDPS Liege announces (Fr) that 5 supporters of party leader Etienne Tshisekedi were arrested in the Matonge neighborhood at a demo on Wednesday. The blog provides four names: Passy Mutombo, Jean Robert Bongeye, Kelly Mukendi and Pepe Lokaso.

Sub-Saharan Africa

L'Odyssee de Tattum just discovered the band Alafia of which she writes (Fr): “With more than 300 concerts in tow, Alafia is a presence at numerous festivals … Alafia's sunny sound is partly inspired by malagasy rhythms such as Malesa and Salegy, but it is first and foremost a melting pot, both human and musical.” You can sample the group's music in the post.